Republican presidential nominee and former US President Donald Trump.
Credit: Reuters Photo
As California battled the deadliest wildfire in its history in 2018, Donald Trump, then the president, initially opposed unlocking federal funding for the state, according to two former Trump administration officials.
But Trump shifted his position after his advisers found data showing that large numbers of his supporters were being affected by the infernos, said the officials, who have both endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris in this year’s presidential election.
Olivia Troye, who was Vice President Mike Pence’s homeland security adviser, said that Trump had initially instructed Brock Long, then the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, not to send “any money” to California, a state that Trump lost decisively in the 2016 election.
Mark Harvey, the senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council in the Trump administration, also recalled Trump delivering that message in a meeting with Long. (Long did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did John Bolton, who was the national security adviser at the time.)
Troye said the episode, which was previously reported by E&E News, was not the only time Trump resisted providing disaster aid to Democratic-leaning regions. She mentioned his response to sending aid to Puerto Rico after it was hit by hurricanes.
“We saw numerous instances — this was just one — where it was politicised,” Troye said in an interview regarding the California episode, adding, “It was red states vs. blue states.”
The Trump campaign disputed the former officials’ accounts.
“None of this is true and is nothing more than a fabricated story from someone’s demented imagination,” Steven Cheung, a campaign spokesperson, said in a statement. “In and out of office, President Trump has shown up to provide aid and relief to Americans in the wake of natural disasters.”
Trump has twice in recent days visited southeastern states battered by Hurricane Helene, falsely accusing Harris of spending disaster funding on migrants.
But during his presidency, Troye said, securing federal financial support for California was a consistent challenge. Hillary Clinton beat Trump by 30 percentage points in California in the 2016 election.
After the 2018 wildfires, Harvey said that he had found election data showing significant support for Trump in 2016 in Orange County in Southern California, which was scarred by the fires, in an effort to sway him. The funds were unlocked soon after, he recalled.
Harvey emphasised in an interview that he did not know whether Trump was moved by election data, by pleas of California officials or by other factors.
Stephanie Grisham, who was the White House press secretary under Trump from 2019 to 2020 but is now supporting Harris, said she did not recall the California wildfire episode. But, she said, Trump “did that basically if there ever was a disaster and a state needed disaster aid.”
“One of his first questions would be: Are they my people?” Grisham, who also once served as an aide to Melania Trump, said Friday.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who has led California since 2019, described the officials’ account as unsurprising, saying in a statement Friday that Trump was “petty, vindictive and self-serving.”
“Disasters don’t discriminate by political beliefs and his words should be a concern for all Californians,” Newsom added.
The accounts of the push and pull over California wildfire funds surfaced after Trump accused the Biden administration of withholding support for Republican-leaning areas affected by Hurricane Helene, the deadliest storm to strike the US mainland in almost two decades.
The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said at a news conference Friday that Trump’s allegation was “categorically false.”
Out of more than 20 Florida counties that the federal government designated as eligible for individual and public assistance through Thursday, Trump lost just three in the 2020 election.